perception, hallucination or reality?

top laup

Say you are in a room with other people, lets say you dont know the people in it so say a train station or something or to simplify just a big room.

Now, say something happens in the room which no one else reacts to in anyway and they claim not to have seen anything or heard anything when asked, does this mean that it didnt happen?

Bottom line if you are a little confused by the above.. a stimulus is created in a room, if no one else gives you any visual cues that they have noticed this event
then can it be said that it did or didnt actually happen!

Morbert

top laup wrote: »

Say you are in a room with other people, lets say you dont know the people in it so say a train station or something or to simplify just a big room.

Now, say something happens in the room which no one else reacts to in anyway and they claim not to have seen anything or heard anything when asked, does this mean that it didnt happen?

Bottom line if you are a little confused by the above.. a stimulus is created in a room, if no one else gives you any visual cues that they have noticed this event
then can it be said that it did or didnt actually happen!

The event happened, but nobody else knows it happened. There is a distinction between things (ontology) and our knowledge of things (epistemology), so the scenario where something happened but nobody knows it happened is distinct from the scenario where nothing happened at all.

18AD

The person in question definitely did see something. Unless they're a liar.

top laup

18AD wrote: »

The person in question definitely did see something. Unless they're a liar.

exactly, so to a bystander who came in afterwards which do they believe?
this is not a litteral question, more a philosophical one which brings up the question of what is the difference between a percieved reality and ACTUAL reality

think of another example. A person is walking through a quiet park and they see a person in a gorilla suit running across in front of them, but cant touch this person/gorilla to establish if indeed they are there or not, BUT the person they are walking with says they didnt see the gorilla and they were looking in the same direction at the time!

so obviously one of them is lying. Lets say there was a third person (the one in the gorilla suit) and they (this person and the other one claiming not to have seen it) were playing a prank on the person who claims to have seen it.

Without knowing it was a prank isnt the person who claimed they saw it going to be accused of hallucinating?

and if so, how can they claim that it wasn't if the other person denies they didnt see it?

18AD

top laup wrote: »

Without knowing it was a prank isnt the person who claimed they saw it going to be accused of hallucinating?

and if so, how can they claim that it wasn't if the other person denies they didnt see it?

I think in this case you would need some material proof if you were trying to claim it wasn't a hallucination.
So the fact that they didn't touch it will leave grounds for doubt.

Obviously the evidence will be more in the liars favour, unless they live in an area with a high gorilla population.

Trog

Morbert wrote: »

The event happened, but nobody else knows it happened. There is a distinction between things (ontology) and our knowledge of things (epistemology), so the scenario where something happened but nobody knows it happened is distinct from the scenario where nothing happened at all.

But that's not to say that you know something happened because you percieved it. We percieve things which aren't there a lot of the time. Take, for example, reading a sentence incorrectly. You percieve a sentence which is, in fact not there. So it's an issue of whether our perception is reliable enough to constitute knowledge.